Sock! and the question of “why”

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Sock is a brilliant mentor of mine in leadership, management, and relationships. He recently wrote me after I sent him an example of a business proposal I’m working on. I’m posting this mostly for myself (my website, after all) to remind myself of why I do things. Sock pretty much hammers the head on this. While it’s a specific example of my “why,” I think you can derive some general principles and apply to anyone’s “why,” so maybe you’ll find it useful too.

From Sock:

“One of the things that jumped out to me regarding the proposal was the statement involving your background.  It just felt like it was qualifying that you were a Philosophy major rather than a business or entrepreneur major, when in fact I think it might be the groups strongest point.  Knowing you and the varied discussions we’ve had, I know that not just about ‘business’ but a purpose of thought behind everything you’re doing.  While there are only a few ‘businees-philosophers’ how many true philosophers actually take action based upon a cause and belief?  You represent that.  You represent that notion that was presented at the Thiel Foundation dinner, that any real world problem the solution will be found in at least two separate professions.  Your product just isn’t about a sport business product, but one centering around the philosophy of valuing human life and the quality of that life by preventive measure, maintenance and management.  From a philosophical standpoint you were compelled to rise up and meet that.  That’s something not many can actually claim.  Now indoctrinate that within an organization and why each of your were drawn together and  you truly have something incredible.  It tells an amazing story of ‘why’, not just ‘what’ you’re proposing or focusing on.

Glad to hear you’re still out there and kicking ass!”

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2012 “Lessons”

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So many of these “Lessons Learned in 2012″ posts should be rather titled “Awesome Stuff I Did and How You Can Do Them Too.” They’re not really learning, just preaching narratives that fit their experiences. Narcissism is a bitch.

Don’t learn from successes: the causal mechanism of success is often random, outside of our control anyway. More important: learn from failures, mistakes, or close-scrapes with utter failure. Make a list from that and it’ll benefit you more than learning from success ever could. Here’s mine:

  1. Trust your friends – just by the fact that they are different from you, they have different knowledge/experience/perspectives. This differentness allows for lateral problem solving, whether business or personal. This differentness is a form of smarter-than, as in they know different stuff so they see the same thing you see differently and bring something new to the table. Thus, trust your friends, because they are smarter than you.
  2. ALWAYS reason from first principles, not from analogy. It’s harder to do, but first principles allow you a framework with which to solve the problem at hand creatively. It’s literally a framework for innovation. Elon Musk talks about this. Engineers are good at this. Make friends with engineers. Then trust them.
  3. Start with morality. Having a strong moral base (actually, ethics) from which you make decisions makes everything clearer. Start here. Read some books: Ethics and Infinity which is a good introduction to Levinas, The Moral Animal by Robert Wright on evolutionary psychology which is okay, Emerson, Hume, and Nietzsche are some of my favorites.

One post I’ve found so far that does it the right way:
2012. Hard Lessons Learned.

Takeaway from the Thiel Under20 Summit: Incredible things can quite certainly be done

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If there’s one thing to take away from last weekend’s Under20 Summit, it’s that incredible things can quite certainly be done. While working on a creative project, you undoubtedly come to a point where you don’t know whether or not what you’re working on will succeed. Panic, mild depression, and whole-days spent in bed ensue. However, when you meet people that have already worked through those blocks and met with success, you realize that… they’re just people. If they’ve done it, then so can you.

The interesting thing is that reality is negotiable. There is a certain way that the world works, and that’s great. But it’s not ideal—there’s always room for improvement. Being an entrepreneur and a creator means to envision a grand improvement, and then work your ass off to find a way to bring reality closer to your vision. It’s a battle, for sure, but worth the wounds in the end.

My two favorite talks: Matt Scholz and Josh Whiton

I’ll be honest, those were the only two talks I went to. But I selected those talks for very specific reasons.

Scholz talked about his experience going from computer science to biotech as he started his company, Immusoft. What struck me most was his genuine personality. I loved sitting outside in the grass, talking with him about everything from recent biotech research to his adventures partying in Ibiza, Spain. I envy his ability to switch in a moment from esoteric talk about protein decoupling to laughing and joking with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen. People that can do that sort of thing are the type of people you should strive to be like.

Whiton’s talk was recommended to me my John Marbach. He spoke about his experience bootstrapping his bus location-tracking company by funding his technology with early sales. Since I’m only 19 years old, it’s not easy to conjure up venture capital for a biotech company. So, I plan to bootstrap my venture with sales, thereby validating and learning my business as I go. Whiton is a soft-spoken guy with a rational sense about him, which I highly respect. He also eats paleo, which is cool.

Great youngins to watch out for

I didn’t get a chance to meet everyone I wanted to meet, but these are the few that made a strong impression on me, and the ones that I think you should watch out for because they’ll be doing great things soon:

Rebecca Kantar – Rebecca’s got a phenomenally vivid sense of life that comes out in the way she talks about and runs her projects. She’s the CEO of the Minga Group and BrightCo, and has a pretty cool TED talk, linked above.

Max Lamb – Max and my startup team got to hang out for a while and walk around Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square. He’s a chill kid with some good ideas and a strong sense for what he really wants as opposed to the bullshit society throws at you. He’s working at a biotech startup right now. Check out his recap of biotech at the Under20 Summit.

Dune Harman – This guy was the social arbiter of the whole thing. He knew almost everyone. On top of that, he knew who I should meet and why (he spoke highly of and introduced me to Emily Peck, another very smart attendee). Watch out for when he puts on his own events, because they will of course be incredible events with incredible attendees.

Carl Shan – I met up with Carl at the Udemy offices, where he’s working on their growth team. Carl’s got a great sense of who he is and what he wants working for Udemy and elsewhere. I can see any project he leads becoming successful, just because of how helpful and personable he is

Of course, there were a few people that slipped under my radar, probably because I didn’t get a chance to talk with them for too long. If you’re one of those kids, shoot me an email, I’d love to hear from you.

Recent Reading

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I’m constantly reading. I used to do book reviews on here, but that got old pretty fast. From now on I’ll just give a list of what I’ve been reading recently, and a short blurb about each book. Here are some books and collections I’ve been spending time with lately.

Business Books

Good to Great by Jim Collins

This was a phenomenal book. Collins basically takes an enormous amount of data, collected from interviews, stock statistics, and news articles, and then rationally debates what the data mean and simplifies it down to a few easy-to-follow lessons. The whole time, he keeps his conclusions logical and empirical, instead of drawing conclusions solely from his own experience, which you see all too often in business. This definitely ranks up there with some of my other favorite business books: The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene… I think that about covers it (for now).

The Lean Startup by Eric Reis

Quick read, and covers some great methods and mindsets for quick and reasonable product development. Unfortunately, I’m not running a software startup, I’m in the biotech space, so most of this was irrelevant to my current situation. Nevertheless, the principles Reis expounds can be applied to just about anything with a bit of creative thinking. Worth a read.

Fiction and Literature

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

As a philosophy student, it was fascinating to read this book. Stephenson basically takes the history of philosophy, transports it to another world (actually a parallel universe), and then changes the names of everything and weaves it into an intricate and interesting story. One example: instead of Occam’s Razor, you have the Steelyard.

This was almost a 1000 page book, so it took a while to finish. But I’m glad I read it all. Next I think I’ll read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, as recommended by Mark Conrad.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

The prototypical beat generation book of poetry. I really liked it, but I’m taking a step back and currently reading a collection of Alexander Pope’s poetry. For some reason, I find poetry to be a more interesting form of literature than the novel. I also really like short stories…

The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant

I picked up this and the collection of Pope poetry after seeing this speech by Ray Bradbury. I find short stories to be immensely intellectually and creatively stimulating. Especially when you consider possible metaphors, symbolism, etc that the author wove into his story.

Psychology Books

The Psychology of Self-Esteem, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, and The Psychology of Romantic Love by Nathaniel Branden

I actually read Branden’s book on romantic love almost a year ago, but I revisited it last month for a paper I was working on, which lead me to become interested in his other works on self-esteem. As I work more on my own projects, I’m realizing how important self-confidence and self-esteem are. Sure, you have to be comfortable with yourself before you can even think about substantial relationships with high-quality people (both friends and girlfriends), but the same goes for anything you create. Making a company and making love are like two sides of a single coin – you have to put your whole being and energy and focus into each in order to do it the right way. And giving your whole self to a project or a person necessarily requires that you are confident in your abilities. (Not arrogant, which is just blind and stupid, but confident in an enlightened-sort of way.)

I highly recommend all three of Branden’s books, but especially The Psychology of Romantic Love.

So, that’s what I’ve been perusing for the past couple of weeks. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading.

Cardio Doesn’t Exist

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The inimitable James Steele II has a new publication out in the Journal of Exercise Physiology, called “Resistance Training to Momentary Muscular Failure Improves Cardiovascular Fitness in Humans: A Review of Acute Physiological Responses and Chronic Physiological Adaptations”

Here’s the abstract:

Research demonstrates resistance training produces significant improvement in cardiovascular fitness (VO2 max, economy of movement). To date no review article has considered the underlying physiological mechanisms that might support such improvements. This article is a comprehensive, systematic narrative review of the literature surrounding the area of resistance training, cardiovascular fitness and the acute responses and chronic adaptations it produces. The primary concern with existing research is the lack of clarity and inappropriate quantification of resistance training intensity. Thus, an important consideration of this review is the effect of intensity. The acute metabolic and molecular responses to resistance training to momentary muscular failure do not differ from that of traditional endurance training. Myocardial function appears to be maintained, perhaps enhanced, in acute response to high intensity resistance training, and contraction intensity appears to mediate the acute vascular response to resistance training. The results of chronic physiological adaptations demonstrate that resistance training to momentary muscular failure produces a number of physiological adaptations, which may facilitate the observed improvements in cardiovascular fitness. The adaptations may include an increase in mitochondrial enzymes, mitochondrial proliferation, phenotypic conversion from type IIx towards type IIa muscle fibers, and vascular remodeling (including capillarization). Resistance training to momentary muscular failure causes sufficient acute stimuli to produce chronic physiological adaptations that enhance cardiovascular fitness. This review appears to be the first to present this conclusion and, therefore, it may help stimulate a changing paradigm addressing the misnomer of ‘cardiovascular’ exercise as being determined by modality.

Key Words: Aerobic, Metabolic, Molecular, Myocardial

Download the paper free here.

One thing strikes me when reading papers from guys like Steele, and Fisher, and McGuff, as opposed to other scientists in the exercise and nutrition fields: They live to a high standard of logical analysis. You won’t find any gross generalizations or assumptions here. Maintaining such a strong will toward truth is so difficult because relativism and mysticism are seductive—it’s easy and tempting to explain things away as mysterious, magic, or different for everyone (I find myself doing so on occasion, in fact).

Whenever you find people that can live up to a high standard of logic and truth, I highly recommend you learn as much as you can from them. Such people are hard to find.

A quick review of Steele’s review: the paper systematically discusses the acute and chronic adaptations resulting from physical training, and explains the most efficient way to achieve these advantageous adaptations (hint: resistance training to momentary muscular failure). As I see it, this is definitely the starting point for anyone wanting to gain a scientific understanding of proper strength training. I’m sending this paper to my exercise science professor, who I’ve been trying to introduce to HIT for almost 2 years now, and hopefully he sees the overwhelming scientific merit of this style of training. I guess it all depends on how strong his will toward truth is.

Conclusion: Congrats to James for such a kickass publication. Rock on.

Elon Musk’s determination

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Dustin Curtis just posted this:

By 2008, SpaceX had launched three rockets. They all failed to make it into orbit. Shortly after the third failure, Elon Musk was interviewed by Wired Magazine’s Carl Hoffman:

Wired.com: At the end of the day you’re still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.

Musk: We haven’t gotten into orbit, true, but we’ve made considerable progress. If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God as my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

Yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station.

Good follow up to the previous quote I posted.